Robert Fry is the very embodiment of colonial racism in Farmington. This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on the dark underbelly of Farmington.
Joseph Fleming, age 24, was tasked with working at the Eclectic on Thanksgiving 1996, already an unpleasant prospect. Matthew Trecker decided to stop by that night, as he was a regular at the shop. What they didn’t know is that they were about to become victims of a serial killer named Robert Fry.
This was Fry’s first known homicide. Fry and his accomplice, Harold Pollock, robbed the store for knives on November 24, 1996. They took the knives out to the desert to hide them. Then Fry demanded that they return to the store and Pollock complied.
Once there, Fry crushed Fleming’s windpipe with his heavy workboot, then slashed his throat. Next he beat and stabbed Trecker to death. Evidently, Fry acted alone in the murders while Pollock was riveted in fear as lookout.
This double homicide was completely senseless and indicated that Fry enjoyed violence just for the sake of violence. Police immediately suspected Fry and Pollock, who had been seen near the shop, but they actually focused on other suspects who appeared more culpable at the time. As a result, Fry ran free for several more years.
Of course, his thirst for violence did not end at the Eclectic that night. On March 31, 1998, Donald Tsosie came into Farmington to sell plasma for cash. He graciously accepted when Fry and his new murderous buddy, Leslie Engh, offered him a ride in their beat-up Ford Aspire. But then things took a horrific turn. Leslie Engh started to strangle Tsosie from the backseat, and Tsosie couldn’t fight him off. Fry pulled the car over on a remote mesa and drug Tsosie from the car, where he proceeded to beat him to death with a shovel. Then he gouged out the man’s eyes and mutilated his genitalia with a broomstick. Fry finally rolled his battered body off a cliff. Tsosie was a member of the Navajo tribe and was 40 years old. He left behind five children.
Fry’s next known act of horror happened on June 6th, 2000. Fry and Leslie Engh picked up 36-year-old Betty Lee from the Turnaround Bar in Farmington. The Navajo mother of five had been ditched by her girl friends, who had gone to a motel room with some men they met at the bar. She couldn’t find a ride home and she was crying. Fry pulled up next to her and told her that he hated to see a woman cry and wiped the tears from her face. Fry seemed like a nice, trustworthy guy when he offered her a ride home in his unassuming Ford Aspire.
But of course we know the monster he really was.
He took Betty Lee out to a remote road where he said he had to pee. He then attempted to drag Betty Lee out of the car and rape her while Leslie Engh held down her legs and removed her pants. She fought back, so Fry stabbed her in the chest. She managed to run away, but he caught up with her and killed her with a sledgehammer. He finished raping her, then Leslie Engh helped him hide her body in some brush beside the road. Engh was clearly a willing and equally sociopathic participant during his second violent rodeo with Fry, though he always maintained his innocence and said Fry forced him to assist in both crimes.
An electric company worker was checking lines the next day when he saw a trail of blood. Thinking it was a deer, he tracked it to try to get some of the meat. Instead, he made the horrid discovery of Betty Lee’s battered body. This time, police were quickly able to trace the crime back to Robert Fry, due to the fact he had gotten his car stuck in the area the night previous.
First, the Aspire got stuck in some sand as Fry attempted to maneuver back to the highway, around 4 am. He called his parents for help and they showed up, ready to tow his car out with their truck. Only their truck got stuck as well. They called a tow truck driver…who also got stuck. They finally called Charlie Bergin with the Bloomfield Towing Company, who arrived and towed all three vehicles out. This created numerous witnesses who could place Robert Fry and Leslie Engh at the scene of the crime that night.
However, there is some doubt as to this version of events. A later statement reveals that Fry’s parents actually didn’t get stuck the first time. Rather, they picked up their son, whose clothes were covered in blood, and took him home to change and shower. Then they returned to the scene of the crime to move his car and that’s when they got stuck. This put them under suspicion for aiding and abetting their son’s crime. Did they know about, and possibly abet, his other crimes?
Police found a cell phone belonging to Charlie Bergin in the area of Betty Lee’s body. Bergin gave his version of events and identified Engh and Fry as the people he had towed out. Then police managed to match footprints at the scene to shoes that Engh and Fry owned. They found a bloody shirt in Fry’s residence. Leslie Engh’s bedroom walls were covered in violent and gory images. Police detained the men, and Engh broke down and confessed everything. This is how Fry’s reign of terror finally ended.
While I don’t think anyone deserves to be murdered by a serial killer, Betty Lee was one of the most innocent victims imaginable. She had five children and was recently divorced. She enjoyed gathering herbs and gardening, and she was studying nursing, indicating her loving and healing spirit. She just wanted to enjoy a night out – and instead she met this horrific end she didn’t deserve at all. I feel so bad for her children who were left without a mother that night.
Fry was a pretty typical serial killer – he was not particularly special or bright and he had a cruelty within him and a flagrant disregard for human life that indicates his mental state. Growing up, he was prone to lying and getting into fistfights. He served in the Navy, where he was stationed in Guam. When he returned to the Four Corners area, he was marginally employed, with stints in construction, bar bouncing, professional driving, and security guard work. He enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons and knife collecting, innocent enough nerdy hobbies until you consider how he acquired some of his knives. He got in trouble many times for rape, assault, battery, and driving while intoxicated, yet somehow these charges always fell off, perhaps due to his mother’s prominent status in the probation department. He had a tattoo of barbed wire around his ankle and he claimed that he added a barb each time he got a new victim. Killing was a passion of his – his favorite hobby. In fact, he once told a friend that it was his calling in life, and he told someone else that he loved watching a person’s soul vacate their body through their eyes.
What blows my mind is how many people were complicit in Robert Fry’s crimes. He had two known accomplices – Harold Pollock and Leslie Engh – and his parents helped cover up his crimes. I guess he is the true definition of a sociopath – charming, manipulative, conniving, and able to get people to bend to his will. That, or people are just a lot eviller than we realize, and Fry had no problem finding like-minded monsters to commit crimes with. Leslie Engh in particular appears to be a perfectly willing accomplice who enjoyed gore in fantasy and in real life.
A reporter named Emilie Karrick Surrusco, who worked for the Farmington Daily Times at the time of Fry’s convictions, believes that Fry’s crimes are eerily reminiscent of the horrible “Indian rolling” days of the past. In 1974, 3 Farmington teens kidnapped 3 drunken Native American men by offering them rides, then took them to a mesa and beat them to death with rocks. They received short terms in reform schools from a judge who claimed that was what the law prescribed. This led to a series of protests from Navajo people, demanding justice and better treatment. This incident is just one of many that indicated the tense racial relationships in Farmington, where white people tend to marginalize and abuse Native Americans with impunity.
It appears to me that Fry was a sociopath who liked to have power over people. The implicit white superiority complex in Farmington and his parents’ positions of power in the community, gave him a sense of power over Native Americans that he enjoyed exploiting. He viewed them as lesser and weaker than himself, and therefore felt he had the right to kill them for fun. But I also imagine he would have killed anyone, had they been in a vulnerable enough position to make easy victims.
Fry is suspected in many murders that he has not been convicted of. I strongly suspect he had something to do with Pernell Tewangoitewa’s unsolved disappearance in 1998. He wasn’t very intelligent and didn’t bother to hide his victims’ bodies well, but it is easy to overlook a body in the vast New Mexico wilderness. Pernell may have been rolled off a cliff or hidden in some bushes like Fry’s other victims, he just hasn’t been found. Maybe one of these days, someone will stumble upon some bones and eventually the state crime lab will get around to testing them and will match them to Pernell Tewangoitewa.
His creepy accomplice, Leslie Engh, deeply troubled Surrusco with his innocent, nerdy facade. He maintains that Fry forced him to aid in the crimes with the threat of death – both times, two years apart. Engh claims that Betty Lee’s screams haunt him to this day and he regrets her death so badly. He also claims that he wasn’t aware Donald Tsosie was dead and he thought Fry just beat him up; he claims that he strangled Tsosie from behind in the car so that he wouldn’t fight with Fry and cause a car accident. Unlike Fry, he is intelligent, and likes to write poetry and read philosophy. Besides helping Fry murder Native Americans, he liked to party and do drugs while working for the natural gas industry in Farmington. Surrusco noted that Engh appears to have many personalities that he easily switches between. He does express guilt and compassion from prison; he has written many letters to the victims’ families begging for forgiveness, before deciding to stop because he felt he was doing more harm than good. Surrusco believes this compassion and remorse is fake. Bob Melton, the lead investigator in the case, doesn’t believe Engh’s innocent act for a second. Thanks to his testimony against Fry, he received a much shorter sentence, but I think he was just as guilty and deserves life too.
So what became of these two? Engh was given only 40 years and will likely get out in his lifetime. The news often overlooks him when they talk about Fry – treating him as a footnote in the crimes. But it seems to me he was equally involved and perfectly complicit. Robert Fry actually stood trial for Betty Lee’s murder in Albuquerque in 2002, due to the high amount of publicity and anger surrounding the cases in Farmington. The jury delivered a guilty verdict and the death sentence, which is exceedingly rare in New Mexico. Then Fry was tried later on for the Eclectic murders and the murder of Donald Tsosie – and was found guilty and given a life sentence for each murder, or 90 years total. Fry was believed to have committed the Eclectic murders alone, without Pollock’s help, based on bloody footprints he left in the store which matched his size and differed from Pollock’s size. Also, Fry had bragged about the murders for years. Pollock took a guilty plea deal and refused to testify in court but his testimony was read in trial. This created grounds for Fry to appeal the guilty verdict later on by claiming prosecutorial misconduct, but ultimately, he lost due to the overwhelming amounts of evidence against him.
Unfortunately, Fry’s death sentence was vacated in 2019. His sentence was vacated along with the sentence of Timothy Allen of Farmington, who kidnapped, raped, and strangled 17-year-old Sandra Philips with a rope in 1994. New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 2009 and Judge Barbara Vigil reviewed these cases as a result. She decided to vacate the death penalties due to the fact other people had committed equally horrendous crimes without receiving the death penalty.
On the bright side, neither Fry nor Allen are getting out of prison in their lifetimes. Both are eligible for parole – but if they are paroled, they have other lengthy sentences in effect which will then kick in, keeping them in prison well past their natural lifespans. I’ve seen equally heinous murders get paroled out for raping and killing women and children in New Mexico, so I am relieved that these predators will not be able to get out and end and ruin more lives.
Fry now claims he has found Jesus and turned his life around in jail. Engh claims to be passionate about Tibetan independence, and a Jesus freak who loves yoga and meditation.
While Fry’s parents never did not receive any legal penalties for their possible involvement in Betty Lee’s murder, Gloria Fry was fired from her job as an adult misdemeanor administrator at the San Juan County probation department, after a petition garnered 250 signatures. Both Gloria and James Fry passed in 2015 in Farmington. Gloria Fry’s obituary claims she was one of the first policewomen in Albuquerque, she worked in establishing a shelter for domestic violence victims in the Four Corners region, and she retired from the probation department. Meanwhile, James Fry left the Army to work as a heavy equipment operator in Chicago for 33 years, before moving to Farmington to work for animal control and the parks and recreation department. He was a prominent member of the Elks Lodge, the Freemasons, and the Shriners.
Sad that they were both so committed to social justice and their community on the surface, while their son abused and murdered the indigenous people of their newfound home of Farmington. Interestingly, neither obituary makes any mention of their son, not even to say that they are survived by him. They did not turn their backs on their son when they found out who he really was – Gloria Fry testified to her son’s sweet nature and innocence till the very end.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of the series on Farmington crime. We’ll delve more into Indian rolling and the racism that lives at the black heart of this town!
http://archive.carte-blanche.org/issues/10/under_the_new_mexico_sky.html
https://www.emaze.com/@aowzlrqf/Forensic-Cases-in-Different-States